Jacquelyn and a few others were curious if I was attending the big ol’ Comic-Con jamboree in San Diego in these upcoming days.
The answer is “nope”, but I will when HABIBI is finished (couple more years). And in the meantime, the organizers of the
Stumptown Comics Festival wanted me to note that they’ll be selling the t-shirt that adapts the poster design by Mike King
and myself, available at Shannon Wheeler’s booth (#2200). More later…

I took a couple of days off when my buddy Alessandro visited from Italy. Here’s a doodle from a front porch conversation:

And here’s a little jumble of chapter five progress. It’s coming along!

Thanks, as usual, for the blog comments. And on that last round, lots of useful self-preservation tips.
For those in Portland, I’ll be at my friend Danny’s LACKTHEREOF cd release party at Holocene tonight.

All my favorite pages of HABIBI are too spoiler-ish to share,
so instead here’s a fairly innocuous/boring page that can be broken down into various stages of development.
It’s outright shameful the lapse of time from the first draft free-form journaled in my sketchbook in October 2004 and the final inks
laid down a couple of days ago. But here you go — 1) sketchbook rough in ballpoint pen… 2) composed into pages in the thumbnail draft…

… 3) the earliest stage of penciling … 4) note how I flipped the first two panels to flow better …

5) final inks. This is page 298. And today I finished page 302. Thank you for waiting!

PS — for those of you interested in production details, check my old tool talk posting.

Quick follow-up to that last entry. Peter asked how big the sketchbook pages are. They’re 9″ x 12″.
Here’s another sketch with today’s page of HABIBI laid behind it. The HABIBI pages are drawn within
an 8.75″ x 12.5″ live area, but you can see how detailed they are compared to the sketchbook.

Because the sketches are drawn from life with plenty of space on the page, it’s easy to dash them off with pocketbrush.
But the comics compositions are ridiculously worked over – generating heaps of eraser shavings. And they’re inked with
these sable watercolor brushes (I’ve graduated to the Winsor Newton series seven!)
(That’s my hand posing to give a sense of the page size.)

Anyways, this HABIBI page was drawn today. And the sketch above is of my friend Kathleen at Benoît Peeter’s apartment in Paris.

There’s dozens and dozens of figure drawing sketchbooks on my shelves, so I’d thought I’d occasionally post a drawing. Almost all of them are executed with those Pentel pocketbrush pens straight to paper with no pencils or erasers or fussing like my comics pages. And the subjects are admittedly almost always pretty girls/women. Occasionally I also draw trees. Here’s a couple drawings – one of Gabrielle and one of Miriam.

My advice to young cartoonists is that the biggest and most important challenge
is simply seeing a project to completion. I’d draw ten pages of a story, get bored
or distracted, then dump ‘em in the drainage ditch, leaving a wake of unfinished
books — until finally sticking with CHUNKY RICE. Below is one of my little
rejected children – Elliot Chicken – and two projects left in purgatory.

The first is from a pitch I proposed to Dark Horse Comics in Fall 1998. Not long after ending my graphic designer employment there (but long enough to recover from tendonitis), I rounded together a book proposal which included character sheets like this one for Elliot, sample comics pages, and a plot synopsis. The project was turned down by the higher-ups, but if it hadn’t, it would have been my firstborn book, claiming eldest rights over Chunky.

This second preview is a few panels from a jam comic my dear cartoonist buddy and Wisconsinite Aaron Renier had begun. It’s drawn “CONVERSATIONS”-style where we’d render half a panel and email it to the other to complete. I revived lil’ troubled Elliot, and Aaron created this bizarre lunk named Waterbear, and we intended to make-it-up-as-we-went-along until we had a 200 page graphic novel!!!
About three pages in, we lost steam.
It was probably the pressure of our bigger projects (HABIBI for me, WALKER BEAN ~coming soonish from First Second~ for him) or a blend of laziness and insecurity. It would have been a lot more fun to draw if we still lived in the same town. These sloppy colors were just slathered on to brighten the blog — Below is an untarnished black&white panel.

In other news, I love reading your comments. Yoplem asked about the ROBOX story. It appeared in a Dark Horse anthology called REVEAL with “Lone Wolf 2000″ on the cover and published in November 2002. Hope your weekend’s been good, everybody!

It seems a lot of artists prefer the drawings that come from their pens when they aren’t thinking or paying attention.

Finally, the fourth chapter is finished.
It took six and a half months, but it’s over a hundred pages long — begun on October 20th, after returning from tour with Menomena — and completed on May 8th, a couple of weeks after Stumptown Comics Fest. In between, there were a handful of out-of-town guests, a couple of trips (including the Grammys), 3 weeks of nagging cold, 1 week of completely paralyzing flu, and one martial arts-induced drawing hand injury (I dropped out of the class). Here’s some peeks at some panels (still hesitant to reveal full pages) and photo proof that I do work (Thaïs snapped the first one, and Lark the second).

I’ll try to attend to comment/questions soon. In the meantime, Tita and other Netherlanders should know I won’t be at Stripdagen Haarlem this year. It seems they’re showing a documentary or something that includes embarrassing footage of me. As always, thank you all for your kind words. They really keep me going!